With the fixes done this week, we now have less than 2500 open tickets left before R1. I had crossed this bar last week already, but not for long as new tickets sometimes come faster than we can close old ones. I think now we are under that bar in a more durable way.

Hi!
So, this week marks the start of the Google Code-In contest. I've spent some of my time preparing some tasks for it as well as reviewing the work from students. Our IRC channel is incredibly busy, and there have been 110 tasks completed by 65 students already. You can currently watch the leaderboard here for unofficial stats: http://ematirov.tk/org/haiku/

The Haiku project was once again chosen as a mentor organization for this year's Google Code-In. The little brother of the Summer of Code is targeting younger students - 13 to 17 years old - and consists of many small tasks that are suitable for that age group. Under the lead of Scott McCreary, over a dozen Haiku mentors have entered roughly 400 tasks into Haiku's GCI page, mostly about creating or fixing haikuporter recipes to package applications and small C++ coding tasks.

Every student that completes at least one task gets a certificate and for at least three tasks additionally a t-shirt. The five best students per organization win a sweatshirt and two of those will be invited to visit the Google headquarters in California in June 2015.

The GCI starts on December 1st and ends on January 19th. In that time many students will probably hit the forums and IRC. Please give them a warm welcome! If you're eligible to participate (or if you know students that might be interested), the Google GCI page has all the info.

Work continue this week with a lot of long overdue UI enhancements. Not very technical work there, but finally closing all those tickets allows us to more easily find the important ones in the bugtracker. These changes also make Haiku more polished and easier to use, which is one of the project goals, after all.

After a great week-end at the Capitole du Libre showing Haiku to other people in the free software community (read François' report for more details - video of my talk should be available "soon"), I'm back to work on the code.

This week I continued work on moving Beta1 forward, fixing some important and less important bugs. To make things clear about what to expect in the upcoming weeks, I will spend more time on Beta1 tasks, but I'll also continue working on WebKit. However, my work there will focus on fixing bugs, rather than adding new features.

Hello there!
I'm now back home after BeGeistert. As you may have noticed if you read the development mailing list, there is a general agreement from the development team for a beta 1 release "real soon now", and after that, it will be time for R1. I will be coordinator for these, which means I will spend a bit less time on WebKit to take care of some other tasks. But I'm not giving up on WebKit, which still needs a lot of changes to reach release-quality.
I was a bit less active this week as I had to recover from the lack of sleep at BeGeistert. But it's all fine now and I should soon be back at full speed.